When W refused the Koyoto accord, he was vilified as a moron who couldn't understand science when it bit his butts. Funny thing, the moron was right, the brilliant ones, especially the press, had less brains than lemmings.

And it's a lot of the same old thing. More collusion to stack the deck for a viewpoint rather than science, more extreme emotions from Phil Jones, but some gems.

The first is Michael Mann referring to the "cause" repeatedly, and the second is secondary comments indicating Michael Mann attacked papers showing the existence of a global Medieval warm period and Little Ice Age. Of course, that goes against MM's theory there was no MWP or LIA, so that's really priceless to see the divisions played out as if it were science among warmist zealots.

@ic: Yes, we really ought to take a look at the big picture when making policy to fight global warming. Let's go from the assumption the models are correct.

What value is there in reducing US C02 emissions when these are now smaller than China, and estimates indicate they will be dwarfed by china and dwarfed by countries such as India?

Well, if we were really concerned about global warming, we could have taken that $800B stimulus and pushed it into Nuclear programs, which would get rid of nasty Coal, radioactive coal, and perhaps get the price down so that it is competitive with Coal, and push it to developing nations.

Somehow, though, we can convert the entire US car fleet to electric in ten years, but Nuclear is too hard.

Many years ago the left knew that the US was sitting on top of massive amounts of oil and natural gas. They also knew that growing demand meant that eventually those resources would get tapped. They also knew that future technologies would help us extract more from existing wells. All this was going to make it mighty tough to stop the extraction of these incredibly valuable resources. The only way to stop it was to come up with something that could really scare people into wanting to stop it. Thus, global warming was born. It has worked pretty well. We have stopped drilling in the gulf. The Keystone pipeline was stopped. 100 watt light bulbs are going to be banned. Now they are stopping shale gas in Ohio because of, wait for it....., the dangerous practice of fracking. It will poison aquifers. You will be able to set your faucet on fire. Yeah right. Like I am always striking matches around my running faucet. Who doesn't like to shave by candlelight? It's all B.S.

But...but...according to Jane Mayer in the New Yorker this week, James Hansen is predicting that if the Keystone pipeline goes through, and the oil is extracted from the Alberta tar sands, "it's game over for the planet".

And we all know how unbiased James Hansen is on global warming, don't we?

"Yet one of the newly released emails, written by Prof. Jones - who is working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - said: 'Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. 'I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.'"

I'm more concerned about the efforts to stack the deck. As an example, there was an email to the effect that some new paper was going to be accepted into the IPCC because they managed to keep some panel down to a single "token" skeptic. And there are other instances in which acts to exclude skeptic thinking were acted upon to keep them out of the IPCC reports.

That's worse than low character, IMO. The people who participated need to be purged from the IPCC, or better yet, the IPCC should be viewed as rotten to the core, disbanded and reconstituted with people who rely on science, and aren't out for a cause.

The "Chakra" wasn't with them. Not only did Algore end up, up-ended. The UN did not get to tax the world. Or re-distribute wealth from countries that earn it. To savages.

Heck, two years ago the EURO was in crisis. And, should have failed. Forcing all the "27 countries" to go back to their old coinage systems. Where banks made money, every time you needed to "exchange" money ... as you traveled. So you could shop among the locals.

They didn't do this! So? Here's the trick. Merkel has been in NEGOTIATIONS for TWO YEARS! Trying to get the german investors "repaid in full." As if investing doesn't carry risks. And, then she wants to toss, to the Belgians, what was once national sovereignty in Europe. TWO YEARS! Can't quite cover her ass. Can't get elected in germany, again. And, you bet. FEARS HER NEXT ELECTION!

Spain spoke.

Greeks are still teaching lessons in real democracy. (Go ahead. Get angry. But every EURO the Greeks brought in, they passed out among all their citizens. Heck, they created 14-month years ... just to give away what they were being lent.)

You want a solution?

We were WRONG to bailout a few banks loaded with toxic paper!

This time? Europe has no pot to piss in. They can't quite "bailout" of their mess. And, ya know what? They haven't got golden parachutes, either.

"Climate-gate" isn't gonna be the problem. FAMINES will kick in. Because people who can't afford them, have babies. Since they don't want to give up sex.

An overpopulated world ... can run havoc.

For the first test? Lets see what the Egyptians do when they run out of food. They're on the list to go "first."

And, following famine, there are 9 other plagues ... until you come to death.

Well, if we were really concerned about global warming, we could have taken that $800B stimulus and pushed it into Nuclear programs

Ha! The "green" elites are so divorced from reality that they oppose just about any mode of energy generation. Even wind turbines are becoming environmental disasters; not only do they blight sightlines in rich Democrat vacation hotspots, but they also make a lot of noise, kill endangered birds, and don't provide any power at 4 p.m. in the summer when it's 95 degrees.

But they still want all the power they need for their European sports cars, ski homes in Aspen, and plane travel to wherever they feel like. As Glenn Reynolds says, when these people start acting like we have an environemental crisis, then I'll start worrying.

If you can't numerically solve the Navier Stokes equations to model the 3d atmosphere owing to short scale cascade, you can't do it no matter how much your research grant is

You appear to be conflating weather forecasting with climate modeling. The former is indeed an initial value problem that will fall prey to chaos after about 2 weeks. The latter is more of an energy balance problem. You can argue that the latter is also poorly solved, but it's not because of chaos.

You appear to be conflating weather forecasting with climate modeling. The former is indeed an initial value problem that will fall prey to chaos after about 2 weeks. The latter is more of an energy balance problem. You can argue that the latter is also poorly solved, but it's not because of chaos.

You need to know the response of the atmosphere to everything.

You have to model the atmosphere, and there's no shortcut.

You don't care that the result is chaotic from the point of view of a weather forecasting, but it has to form clouds etc correctly in response to changes that you put in, which depends on detailed flow, which detailed flow you can't do.

Instead, modellers will always pull things out of their ass and solve that instead.

Whether they hide that or not, they have to do it, and so a priori the model is no good for what it's supposed to be for.

A generation ago "climatology" was an obscure little grotto in the Land Of Meteorology. Now it drives $billions in research with real-world implications in the $trillions. It is rotten, through and through. I submit that nearly every single person who has entered the science since the AGW scam was launched is corrupt.

How does MSM manipulate news? If this was a Big Corporation or a conservative political group, the Emails would be "leaked". But since it involves a group promoting global warming theories, every newspaper article I have seen calls them "stolin emails". My paper yesterday referred to them as "old" and a "controlled release". Besides stolin.

www.wattsupwiththat.com has some great email exchanges from this source. A classic,leading hoaxer Phil Jones admits that he does not know how to compute a trendline in Excel...http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/24/crus-dr-phil-jones-world-renowned-climatologist-cant-even-plot-a-trend-in-excel/

This is a terrible blow to the real scientists too. Those were the ones being shut up by the Journal editors.

Of course the conspirators just did it for fame and loot. I loved their E-mail about sharing Nobel Prize fame and especially the money.

The actual motive behind the hoax was simply another round of Nazi engineered mass murders.

First the mandatory elimination of carbon based energy supplies results in crop shortages, and then famines open half of the world's "Surplus People" to die of designer plagues in their weakened state.

It's not just Jew and Slav extermination aimed at this time. it's everybody dumb enough to get themselves declared surplus.

What do you do for the community anyway? The death Panels are thinking about you as we speak.

The High Priest of this latest mass murder movement turns out to be none other than Barack Obama.

I agree. Just like last time, they'll convene a commission of true believers to produce a report. The report will say the tone of the emails is regrettable, but the science is unimpeachable. They'll just ignore any evidence of data tampering.

These "climate" scientists have tuned their models to fit the past, but it seems to me have failed terribly to predict the future. Remember these guys have been around for 20+ years, and then predicted we'd all be under water by know and the temps would be out of control.

Come back to me after you can make predictions 20-40 years into the future then prove it with evidence.

All models have "knobs". Any modeler can get most any result over a short period by tuning the knobs.

Yeah, it was all a lie. A scam. A hoax. Faked. But it coulda been true. We know in our hearts it coulda just as easily been true, if only it had been. So it wasn't. No big deal. And besides, they did it for the right reasons. So in the end it's all okay. So there.

Yes, glad you stopped this -- I was sent it too, and decided to spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats

Madison Man--first I am absolutely not a climate scientest and I have absolutely no familiarity with models of climate; but, did not the Mann "hockey stick" rely on proxy's for climate from the past; eg, tree ring data? Is that not that a look into the past? If I missed the intention of your post, mea culpa

1. Man's activity has caused disharmony in nature. We must submit to nature, listen to her, and change our ways to save ourselves. The End is Nigh! Science yields genuine truth. Progress is next.2. A benevolent technocratic/bureaucratic elite shall guide us along in this process. In their wake, human beings in not only Western societies, but even globally have the opportunity to shed their tribal, religious, cultural, linguistic differences and draft legislation! One world government! These principles are universal!3. Finally we can regulate this economy and get away from the greed of capitalism and corporations. 3. Al Gore can feel both religiously and secularly important again4. "They" won't let us protest/love/organize/live in freedom/be nature's children/live in harmony/believe in crazy things like eugenics.

It's become a popular cause, a secular belief system, a political means for change, an identity, has made and broken careers...a money distribution system etc.

did not the Mann "hockey stick" rely on proxy's for climate from the past; eg, tree ring data?

I can't speak for Mann's hockey stick but there has been use of tree ring data in some models. The problem is that the tree ring data may not be showing what they claim it does. Simply put, trees grow more in some years than they do in others. This causes the rings of the faster growing years to be thicker than other years. However, that doesn't automatically correlate to temperature.

What environmental factors could influence tree growth? Temperature might be one but I'd lay good money on the argument that precipitation is a stronger factor. In years of favorable precipitation (not too little and not too much), the trees will grow more than in other years. Consider the drought in Texas this year. It's been quite warm there but extremely dry. I'll wager that the trees there didn't grow very much this year due to the lack of water.

In summary, tree rings do show differences in the rate of growth from one year to the next. I assert that the biggest factor in the rate of growth isn't temperature but is more likely precipitation.

The Earth is warmer than it was 100-150 years ago. But that was never in contention - it is a straw man argument. The magnitude and causes are what skeptics question.

The fact that it can't be established with precision that this temperature increase is within the normal range of fluctuation over millennia is a different issue. But even the best-known climate-change skeptic grants that there's been warming.

1. Man's activity has caused disharmony in nature. We must submit to nature, listen to her, and change our ways to save ourselves.

What has always confused me is the confluence of thought from someone who a) believes wholeheartedly in evolution and none of creationism and b) believes, given a), that humans exist somehow outside of nature.

It would seem, given a), that nothing we do, build, think, shit, or otherwise accomplish would exist outside nature.

Chip S: I have no doubt the earth is warming but I posit it is because we are coming out of the last ice age--yes human activity has increased but I have seen nothing in the data to suggest human activity has a lot to do that overrides major geological activity in the earth's climate cycles. I remain agnostic--and certainly the shennanigans of the EAU folks have not disabused me of my belief.

You can do a lot with ring width if you know roughly when and where the tree was felled. This has been used, for example, to date old violins where the provenance was uncertain; we've got some idea of tree rings in the 17th and 18th centuries for Italy and its surrounds, just because this evidence was useful for this purpose.

But this doesn't have anything to do with temperature, necessarily, for the reasons Larry J. lays out. Trees might grow more in some years than others for many reasons besides temperature, though (local) climate is the obvious factor.

If it's rainfall rather than temperature that makes the growth difference, you'd have to show that higher temperatures meant more rain to attribute the change to global warming. Maybe not so hard to do: certainly wherever I've lived, the clearer the skies, the colder the weather. You have your choice of cold and dry, or warm and wet.

The worst thing that these "climatologists" have done is to turn the science into a religion and a litmus test for political loyalty.

Climate change may turn out to be a serious problem - especially if the globe is now at the apex of an interstadial and will soon turn cooler and move into another glaciation event - but it is professional death for any scientist to acknowledge he or she is gathering data for any theory that might come to that conclusion, or any conclusion differing at all from that promoted by the EAU crowd.

@RogerJ--Pardon me if I misinterpreted your comments about tree-ring data. But if you distrust those types of data sources, what's the basis for your confidence about the current warming being nothing more than a recovery from the Little Ice Age?

I happen to think that we ought to focus a lot more on adaptation to climate change rather than prevention of it, b/c that's prudent no matter what the causal factors may be. But I don't think we ought to let skepticism over Phil Jones and Michael Mann's agendas spill over into denial of the modern temperature record.

Chip S: good question--as I have noted I am not a climate scientist; but I think I know enough about the geological cycles of our planet to assert the earth has been through numerous climate periods--the last ice age ended some 12000 years ago, and I am suggesting we as a planet are still undergoing that change.

As to any threats caused by this, I am confident enough to think we as a species can adapt without draconian rememdies from government.

You may disagree, of course.

In the realm of things I do not care about, climate change is high on the list.

"I would have thought that this writer would have know better! I keep on seeing people saying this same stupid thing. I’m not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here."

"This" being plot a trend line in Excel. It requires 2 mouse clicks. Right click on the graph to open the menu, Left click on "create trend line" to create one.

And this guy can't figure out how to do this?

And we are supposed to believe that someone too stupid (sorry, there is no other word) to do a trendline in Excel is smart about anything else?

RogerJ--I think that one big issue that will arise if the earth continues to warm will be refugees. Some places will become more pleasant places to live, while others become uninhabitable. Will people be allowed to move in response?

How would you disaggregate the data relative to tree ring growth as a function of climate or weather? Now I will grant it is possible if we take the same tree growth across the globe assuming we assess all tree ring growth from trees with the same life spans--but it would be a difficult task I think.

Chip: again, yes--in the case of severe consequences from a couple of degrees C some people may move--but I honestly dont see that as big issue--certainly, there will be more areas suitable for habitation in northern climates than now exist.

This doesn't prove the hypothesis of AGW/AGCC/"climate disruption" false. It does suggest that sovereigns, cooperatives, and individuals promoting this agenda possess an ulterior motive. It does suggest they are sufficiently motivated to bypass the scientific process, thereby undermining the credibility of science itself.

Under normal circumstances, people endeavor to reduce risk in their lives. For some reason, the people implicated in "Climategate" decided that the value of some incentive outweighed the risk of suffering exposure and corrupting scientific enterprise.

It may have been just about a standard matter of stroking one's ego; but, it is more likely that dreams of physical and material instant gratification were the overriding incentives.

There is no legitimate reason for scientists of integrity to resist responding to contrary evidence and argument.

Penn State University professor Michael Mann – a prominent player in the earlier controversy whose name also appears in the latest leak – said on Twitter that "the cause" he was referring to was the cause of "communicating science in face of massive disinformation effort."

Chip asked where I got the +/- 3 to 5 degrees and it is a fair question.

It is partly a guess on my part based on several things:

1) The inherent imprecision and inaccuracy in how temperatures were taken and recorded over the past century. See my comments about my experience "measuring" ocean temperature in a previous thread, for example.

2) The movement of temperature stations all over the place. We have very few that have been in the same location even over 50 years.

3) When the station has not moved, the surroundings have often changed. Someone here the other day referred me to an article about the SeaTac airport temperatures where they discussed the effect of building a new runway next to the thermometer. Many others were in fields 50 years ago and are now in built up areas.

4) There is a study by the USCGS (?) of their temperature monitoring stations. They say that only something like 10% are accurate to within a degree and some large percentage, more than half IIRC are more than 3-4 degrees off. (Its been several years since I saw it so don't hold me too exactly to the numbers)

I think I have posted about it here before and can probably find the link if you like.

5) Nobody will tell us what the real +/- is. At least not that I have ever seen. Have you seen this? If is was pretty precise, say less than +/- 0.8 degrees, I would expect that they would be saying this.

I did not say the data was "random". that is your word. I said imprecise. And probably inaccurate. The data is based on measurements. Even if they will not tell us what those measurements are. My doubts have to do with the accuracy and precision of those measurements. +/- 3 to 5 degrees is my best guess for lack of anything better.

You make stuff up and then ask me for better data? Why can't I just make up my own?

Anyway, I've already provided you with a link to the BEST site.

BTW, the entire point of error bounds is to delimit the range of variation beyond which "random fluctuation" can be ruled out at a predetermined significance level. Imprecise measurement is measurement that's too polluted by random error to be meaningful. You're drawing a distinction without a difference.

Ah J no argument, just spin, good idea...please start yelling and pounding the table, after you have neither the law nor the facts on your side. I believe the fellow who pulled the “Vaccine Scam” had peer-reviewed articles, too. Peer-reviewed doesn't mean true, merely that no obvious mistakes were made.

This shit is so absurd it makes satire utterly impossible. But it ain't funny. Not in the least. Some of these cocksuckers need to go to jail. Fuck the legal sophistry.

I'm afraid we are headed for a society where extralegal measures will become the norm. Just what the left wants in order to demonize the so-called sheeple. Only this time it won't work. You cannot destroy the middle class with impunity. You cannot empower people then strip it away in the name of some cultish end-of-the-world bogey man.

The last glaciation event within the present Ice Age (approx. 2.7 million years long at this point) peaked about 18,000 years ago. The warmest global climate so far in this interstadial is supposed to have occurred about 11,000 years ago.

If warming is so bad, why is it that the paleontologists keep talking about how benign the climate was back in dinosaur times?Global temperatures 15-20 degrees F warmer than now, palm trees and crocodiles in Scotland, and no ice anywhere, but on the highest mountain tops?

There is a study by the USCGS (?) of their temperature monitoring stations. They say that only something like 10% are accurate to within a degree and some large percentage, more than half IIRC are more than 3-4 degrees off.

You should know that the variation in individual measurements is why people average their data over multiple sources. Thus, the difference b/w standard deviation and standard error. The Berkeley study used every single data source available.

Someone here the other day referred me to an article about the SeaTac airport temperatures where they discussed the effect of building a new runway next to the thermometer. Many others were in fields 50 years ago and are now in built up areas.

Believe it or not, the BEST researchers were as aware of this issue as are Althouse commenters. They explicitly looked at the differences in measured temperature changes at urban and rural positions and found no difference.

@Maguro--"Appeal to authority" is a fallacy when it takes the form "Paul Krugman has a Nobel Prize so everything he says must be well-reasoned." I don't think that citing the most recent, most careful research conducted under a prominent global-warming skeptic qualifies.

And as long as you're talking logical fallacies, how about the ad hominem fallacy: Michael Mann and Phil Jones sent shady-looking emails, so Richard Muller can't be trusted.

Believe it or not, the BEST researchers were as aware of this issue as are Althouse commenters. They explicitly looked at the differences in measured temperature changes at urban and rural positions and found no difference.

Which is weird, since there has been abundant evidence for a urban heat island effect for a long, long time. (I.e., as places get more urban, their microclimates warm, irrespective of what is happening to the larger climate). The BEST finding claims that if there is any effect on urbanization, it is to cool things, not to warm them. The mechanism by which this could possibly happen is not explained.

Prominent skeptics liked the Berkeley study just fine before they saw the results:

I still believe that BEST represents a very good effort, and that all parties on both sides of the debate should look at it carefully when it is finally released, and avail themselves to the data and code that is promised to allow for replication.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project aims to do what needs to be done: That is, to develop an independent analysis of the data from land stations, which would include many more stations than had been considered by the Global Historic Climatology Network.

Believe it or not, the BEST researchers were as aware of this issue as are Althouse commenters. They explicitly looked at the differences in measured temperature changes at urban and rural positions and found no difference.

Likely more aware. That said, there is a distinct difference between urban heat island effect and the effect of siting a measurement site next to a heat source, such as runway or air conditioning exhaust.

The study cited tries to compare rural and not rural sites. But, I am not sure how valid their results are, because they seem to be aggregating a lot of non-urban sites into the group containing urban sites.

Nevertheless, you do have a point - that researchers have been trying to quantify the urban heat island effect.

And as long as you're talking logical fallacies, how about the ad hominem fallacy: Michael Mann and Phil Jones sent shady-looking emails, so Richard Muller can't be trusted

That's either naive or disingenuous. The corruption and intelllectual dishonesty goes far beyond Mann and Jones - it encompasses the entire climate science community. The last group of climategate emails detailed how the peer review process itself had been corrupted to the point that the results were preordained. Nothing coming from this gang is to be trusted.

And as someone who lives in a rural area, I am extremely skeptical that the urban heat island effect is negligible. My temps out in the middle of a cornfield are consistently 2-3 degrees F lower than those measured in a nearby small town. Granted, my equipment is not calibrated, but still. In any case, I'm certainly not prepared to take a climatologist's word for it. You might as well ask an astrologer for his opinion of astrology.

Let me amend my previous post - the researchers automatically categorized sites utilizing satellite imagery as very rural and not very rural, and in that later category, we would likely find the sites that would be considered urban.

The BEST finding claims that if there is any effect on urbanization, it is to cool things, not to warm them.

It says no such thing. It says that the warming trend in rural areas is (very slightly) greater than the warming trend in urban areas. I realize that you're just repeating what was posted at your link, so the error originates with the critic and not you, but it's a major error of interpretation. As for the rest of the critique, it's true that the curve-fitting technique used in the Berkeley UHI study isn't as efficient as it could be if it took autocorrelation into account, but there's no reason to believe that the estimates are biased.

I read it. Anthony Watts seems as invested in his position as Michael Mann is in his. One of the most flagrant attempts at misrepresentation I've seen yet in this debate is the Daily Mail chart that Watts posts at your link, distancing himself from it by calling it "a bit naughty", while nevertheless giving it prominence.

Miller appears to be unhappy b/c the leveling-off of temps over the past decade wasn't emphasized by BEST. Fine. But last time I checked in with the climate-skeptic crowd it was claimed that low solar activity was the reason for that.

There's no logical contradiction in saying that multiple factors affect the earth's climate. It could be affected by solar activity and CO2. I have no idea. Maybe we can't speculate at all, b/c climatologists can't meet rh hardin's standard of evidence. But the first order of business is to establish what exactly has been happening to global temps. Muller et al. established to a point accepted even by Watts that there's been significant warming up to the end of the last century.

I read it. Anthony Watts seems as invested in his position as Michael Mann is in his

Watts and the Daily Mail are irrelevant in this case. Though I thought you might be interested in what Watts had to say since you used him in one of your earlier appeals to authority, but whatever.

The point is that Judith Curry, the BEST paper's co-author, has denounced her own paper, her co-authors and the peer review process that allowed it to be published. "This is 'hide the decline' stuff" - her words, not mine or Anthony Watts's.

But by all means keep clinging to your precious peer-reviewed paper, thinking it contains some kind of objective truth. The fact that one of the principal authors says it's bullshit is no reason to doubt it's conclusions, eh? The scientists know best and who are you to question them?

@Maguro--I'll go over this one more time: Muller was a prominent global-warming skeptic. He headed a comprehensive study using methods that were praised by the leading GW skeptics. Based on the results of that study, he changed his mind. Miller's complaint does not pertain to the basic finding of warming, but rather to what's happened in the past decade.

If you think of that summary of the evidence as an "appeal to authority," then I really don't have anything more to say to you here. But you can stop claiming that I ever wrote that the results of that study should be blinded accepted b/c it was "peer-reviewed;" I did not.

Miller's complaint does not pertain to the basic finding of warming, but rather to what's happened in the past decade.

Well, yeah, that's what the dispute is about, butt that's kind of important, no? The fact that there's been no warming in the past decade Is kind of significant in my view, and Muller did everything he could to suppress that finding.

And if that part of the study was botched (charitable reading) or purposely cooked (more likely- this is climate science, after all), what does that say about the rest of it?

Getting back to what caused you to reference the paper in the first place, I still can't buy off on their assertion that the UHI effect is slight and negative. That does not square with my experience in the real world, or with anything else that I've read about UHI.

Like making accusations of sexual harassment that would never stand up in court...so you don't go to court. The BEST paper release was like that...get it out, make it splashy and figure the usual suspects will do their usual job of covering up the messy bits.

My main point was that this is a very good data set, the best we currently have available for land surface temperatures. To me, this should have been the big story: a new comprehensive data set, put together by a team of physicists and statisticians with private funds. Showing preliminary results is of course fine, but overselling them at this point was a mistake IMO. ...

I did not say that “the affair had to be compared to the notorious Climategate scandal two years ago,” this is indirectly attributed to me. When asked specifically about the graph that apparently uses a 10 year running mean and ends in 2006, we discussed “hide the decline,” but I honestly can’t recall if Rose* or I said it first. I agreed that the way the data is presented in the graph “hides the decline.” There is NO comparison of this situation to Climategate. Muller et al. have been very transparent in their methods and in making their data publicly available, which is highly commendable.

Added note: I have dug into my memory. Rose brought up hide the decline in our first interview, in the context of the plot that ends in 2006. He called me back specifically to discuss this and teased the “hide the decline” out of me. The hide the decline discussion was in this particular context.

The climategate clowns are as credible as Jerry Sandusky. James Hansen's climate data is like Tim Geithner's tax returns. The omissions are in his favor - but don't let that stop you from believing him.

The FDA was on track to approve thalidomide and would have approved it. It was pure luck--or just that the FDA was more sclerotic in its approval process, not diligence that it wasn't approved here back in the late 50's early 60's.

As it turns out, the drug is currently approved--of course women who are (or may become) pregnant may not take it.